U.S. Favorability Ratings and the “Global Popularity Contest”

Still, there’s no overlooking the central point of this tussle: In the global popularity contest between Barack Obama and Ali Khamenei, the ayatollah is winning.

Claims of Iran’s isolation are often exaggerated, and the Western governments that have been leading the effort to sanction and isolate Iran are almost always the ones that try to present Iran as more internationally isolated than it is. Many governments around the world don’t perceive the same threat from Iran that Western governments claim to perceive. These traditionally non-aligned governments don’t have the same obsession with Iran’s nuclear program that the U.S., Israel, and a few other countries have, so it’s not surprising that they tend not to support efforts to isolate Iran on account of its nuclear program. Having said that, the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran doesn’t tell us very much about Obama or America’s “popularity” around the world.

Hawks usually argue that the importance of U.S. favorability is overrated, but this is the measure that Stephens wants to use to support his rickety argument:

In June, the Pew Research Center released one of its periodic surveys of global opinion. It found that since 2009, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. had slipped nearly everywhere in the world except Russia and, go figure, Japan.

Yes, it’s true that U.S. favorability has declined since 2009. In many countries, it has gone from being unsustainably high in the first year that Bush was no longer in office to being merely very high. Low U.S. favorability in many Muslim countries continues and grows worse in some places because of U.S. policies and actions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Stephens isn’t kidding when he writes that “no U.S. president since Jimmy Carter has been so widely rebuked,” which conveniently overlooks the last President, who was far more widely rebuked and despised around the world. Bush badly damaged or destroyed U.S. favorability in most countries by the time he left office, and the U.S. is still recovering from the damage.

International disillusionment with Obama since 2009 has some of the same causes as the disillusionment of Obama supporters here at home: they had and were encouraged to have unreasonably high expectations, and those expectations could never have been met. To the extent that Obama continued and added to Bush-era policies abroad, his reputation around the world has suffered. Most people in other nations believed that Obama was something other than the fairly hawkish conventional Democrat that he always was, and now they know better.

Even so, U.S. favorability in most countries remains higher than it was in the late Bush years. Except for Muslim-majority countries, where Obama’s unpopular policies have generally been most to Stephens’ liking, U.S. favorability is still higher now than it was in 2008. When asked about their confidence in Obama versus Bush, the contrast between 2008 and 2012 is even more dramatic: a 14-point improvement in Russia, a 22-point improvement in Turkey (where the numbers are still abysmal, but significantly better than Bush’s 2%), an 18-point improvement in Egypt, 26-point improvement in Mexico, and even a nine-point improvement in Poland. If this is what a “rebuke” looks like, we could use more of them.

Does this mean that foreign governments are necessarily going to become more cooperative on contentious issues? Of course not. Other governments will still have their own priorities and interests, and it is increasingly difficult for the U.S. to get other states to ignore their own interests for sake of a U.S. policy goal. That is a result of the emergence of more independent and assertive rising powers, which would be happening whether or not the U.S. was viewed more or less favorably.

Yup, the hawks/neocons/globalists are pretty inconsistent on this popularity stuff. Most of the time they say that they do not care what those lousy cheese-eating surrender monkeys think about anything. Then, they turn around and say that Romney (or McCain before him) is very popular among Israelis, and cite that as a reason to support him (because, it goes without saying, Israeli opinion is vitally important to US foreign policy). Now, here is one of that crowd saying that Obama has not improved our popularity — so let’s go start a war that will send the price of oil through the roof and bring the global economy to its knees! That’ll make ’em love us again!

Follow the logic? No? Well, you must be an isolationist, or an anti-Semite, or an appeaser of the Islamofascists.

I think that on the whole, the starting assumption – Bret Stephens ever makes any sense – is problematic.

But more to the point, it seems to me that you are missing the central tenet of any Obamacriticism on the part of professional Republicans and/or the Op-Ed page of the WSJ, and it is this: whatever measure or standard of that is considered irrelevant or anti-American under a Republican administration, is thoroughly fair and indeed mandatory for the assessment of a Democratic President. Once you apply this analysis, Republican criticism begins to make sense.

And so “a decent respect to the Opinion of mankind” is suddenly important to assess Obama’s international standing, whereas it would have been rank treason to do so under Bush.

A corollary to that is that Obama’s performance on any given subject should be assessed as against the lowest, or highest, number (as might be relevant) in the past decade, rather than as against a number that makes objective sense. This is how Niall Ferguson, the Harvard professor, ends up evaluating Obama’s economic performance as of January 2008. This is how Stephens ignores Bush’s standing internationally, and compares Obama of 2009 with Obama of 2012.

The sad thing is not the intellectual poverty or, better, whoredom that this sort of analysis represents. It is that many people are taken in by it. Disraeli had it right: damned lies and statistics …